Interwar Algeria in Flux

The interwar years were a time of enormous social transformation for Algerian society because of a variety of factors, including Algerian men’s participation in World War I, their labor migration to France, urbanization, and more Muslims having access to positions within the French colonial bureaucracy. Social classes among Muslims were in flux. Allison Drew has offered a helpful description of the social classes. At the top, she writes, were the vieux turbans (old turbans), the Muslim landed elite who were socially and religiously conservative, often with ties to particular Sufi saints.³ In the interwar years this group’s power started to decline, unless they reinvented themselves through new access points to power, including employment in the French colonial bureaucracy or courts.⁴ There was also a newer “economic elite composed of factory owners, managers, high-level civil servants and professionals.” These were the most assimilated to European culture; they spoke French, may have even lived in or near European neighborhoods, and were “generally conservative or moderate in their politics.” Next was a growing middle class of “small and middle businessmen, civil servants, professionals, technicians, white collar workers and certain skilled workers.” Finally, below them was the large Muslim working class, who in rural areas often performed agricultural labor and in cities often took on irregular work, as day laborers or dockworkers, for example.⁵

In spite of these divisions, however, the interwar years were characterized by a fluidity in which intellectuals straddled multiple communities. These new social, political, and religious formations reflected a society in flux as the divisions between European settlers and colonial subjects became increasingly murky socially, even as they remained relatively rigid legally. McDougall has described the fluidity and interconnectedness of the interwar social climate: “Among intellectuals and professionals, journalists, schoolteachers and social reformers, in schools and at university; in cafés, political parties and freemasons’ lodges; in rural medical clinics, markets and post offices; and at particular, brief moments, especially in the enthusiastic mobilisations around the Popular Front in 1936, Algerians of all confessions and languages, citizens and non-citizens, met, disputed and agreed, worked together and across the divisions of colonial society.”⁶ In this single sentence, McDougall identifies some of the major actors and settings of the interwar social worlds. Most key, however, is McDougall’s description of how these various individuals and communities “met, disputed and agreed, [and] worked together.” This gets at not only the collaboration between communities but the extent to which there were overlaps and intersections across the different communities as they convened in various spaces.

Many of these zones of cross-class contact and connection were male-dominated. Yet women of various classes also gathered in some spaces of urban public life, including in schools, theaters, cinemas, Popular Front demonstrations, mosques, and cemeteries. Women also participated in urban culture in varying ways depending on their class. In terms of shopping, for example, working-class women’s buying power was limited by their meager wages. Any extra money would go toward something small like cigarettes or black market coffee.⁷ Upper-class urban women, on the other hand, many of whom would have been part of families of landed elite or civil servants, were “eager to purchase new things, whether they come from Europe or from the East,” according to French functionary Marguerite Bel.⁸ This class of women were also the consumers of luxury items for household use, including textiles produced with linen or silk.⁹ Dahbia Lounas, a woman born in 1933 from the rural town of Mirabeau (today Draâ Ben Khedda) near Tizi Ouzou, saw the city as “beyond our means and our culture.”¹⁰ She described urban spaces like cafés, theaters, and cinemas as spaces that in her childhood she envisioned were solely “for the French.” Despite how urbanization continued in the decades after the interwar years, the public life it created did not affect all Algerians the same way.

Living quarters too reflected varied lived realities. In Algiers, while all classes of Muslims intermixed in the casbah, the conditions under which they lived varied. The Ottoman-era buildings of the casbah tended to be two or three stories high, with three or four rooms per floor, and a courtyard in the middle. The vast majority of casbah dwellings were overcrowded, with extended families sharing a home and many people sleeping in a single room. By the end of the interwar years, more families were moving into the bidonvilles (shantytowns) on the outskirts of town. The first bidonville appeared outside Algiers between 1926 and 1930, and their numbers continued to swell from thirteen in 1938, sixteen in 1942, fifty-eight by 1947, and 164 by 1954.¹¹ These cramped living conditions were one urban reality that reflected how the colonial divide between settlers and Muslims remained stark. Scholars have studied many aspects of Algeria’s settler colonialism including, among others, its architecture, its urbanism, its bifurcated legal system, and its violence.¹² A closer look at the Muslim press and its discussion of women illustrates how Muslims diagnosed the problems of the Algerian present and proposed paths toward better futures in ways that were both shaped by the settler-colonial context and pushed beyond it to look toward the Middle East.

The Growth of Muslim Presses and Publics

There was an explosion of the Muslim press in the interwar period, facilitated by new printing technologies that made printing a newspaper less expensive. Consequently, the number of Muslim newspapers exploded from a handful to dozens, and there were more spaces for Muslim communities and editors to broadcast their points of view. In the interwar period the European settler press in Algeria had consolidated into several newspapers that reprinted international wire news and featured less editorial analysis.¹³ In contrast, the Muslim press in Algeria, which emerged strongly in the 1920s and 1930s, frequently granted Muslim editors significantly more power to control editorial content. Since Muslims also read European newspapers for news, Muslim publications often printed commentaries on the news, as well as on social and political questions.

Many editors in the Muslim press adopted several strategies to make the pages of their publications a space for community exchange, rather than a consistent expression of a single viewpoint. Content was generated not only by editors but also by community members. Readers were regularly invited to contribute, and editors regularly published their letters. Some of these letters were from remote, rural areas, which reflected the press’s broad reach beyond Algeria’s urban centers. Contributors frequently commented on recently published editorials in other publications. Editors published opinions with which they themselves disagreed. Publications solicited readers to write on particular questions and often hosted debates that were published across multiple issues between contributors with opposing perspectives.

In his thorough study of Algerian media, Arthur Asseraf has recently complicated Benedict Anderson’s famous thesis that the press brings people together ideologically. The interwar Algerian press certainly helped create community, as Anderson describes presses broadly doing. Yet Asseraf has shown how in Algeria the press also further fractured an already divided settler-colonial society. I argue that discussions about women illustrate both the contours of these fractures and surprising convergences among various political, religious, and social groups. Scholars of the Algerian press have often divided the Muslim press into distinct ideological groups, such as the French-language assimilationist press or the proto-nationalist Muslim reformist press, but such neat categorizations risk oversimplifying the nuanced positions contained within each publication.¹⁴

Some publications of course had clear ties to particular political or religious projects, such as the official and unofficial organs of the Muslim reformist movement, al-Shihab (The Meteor), al-Bassair (The Insight), and La Défense, or those affiliated with the community of schoolteachers, like La Voix des Humbles (The Voice of the Poor) and La Voix Indigène (The Indigenous Voice). These two communities, Muslim reformists and schoolteachers, constitute two of the most important communities who reappear throughout this book, and yet they were hardly neatly defined, contained communities. Other publications were less transparent in their allegiances. While French colonial officials described it as favorable to the French cause, the largest Muslim publication, the Arabic-language al-Najah (Success), published editorials that straddled a range of religious and political opinions. Even schoolteacher publications, which could be easily written off as assimilationist, raised important critiques of French colonial policies and practices. One of the central contentions of this book is that interwar intellectual life was messy, and the elite Muslims who participated in it often maintained multiple religious, cultural, and political allegiances.

Anderson draws a neat line between the emergence of the press and eventual national unity. Stephanie Newell has argued that historians too frequently turn to nationalism to explain press activity and shows instead that both editors and readers were motivated by a wide range of political, social, and cultural allegiances.¹⁵ Discussions about women show how the press was also a place for multiple imaginings, some of them ambivalent about nationalism. The history of debates about women is also a history of how a new communal intellectual life developed within interwar Algeria, even as most Muslims struggled to eke out a living. The press is not simply a source base that offers access to these debates. It is also an integral character within the story of how women’s status became such a contentious and important issue within interwar Algeria.

Competing Visions at the Newsstand

The Muslim press in the interwar years was a mouthpiece to a wide range of political, religious, and social communities who used their publications to both preach to their existing following and court new followers. This vibrant communal intellectual exchange planted the seeds that grew into the activism (anti-colonial as well as feminist) of later generations. A closer look at some of the key publications offers an important context to their role within the world of the press. Debates about women help illustrate how these communities were interconnected in a larger network of interwar Muslim public life.

La Voix des Humbles (1922–47) was the official organ of l’Association des instituteurs d’origine indigène d’Algérie (the Association of Schoolteachers of Indigenous Origin, AIOIA). Many of the schoolteachers did not come from elite families, but their education in French colonial écoles normales d’instituteurs in Bouzareah, Oran, and Constantine enabled them to teach in French colonial schools. Over its long lifespan, the review featured the voices of 367 contributors, ninety-six of whom were former students of the école normale and graduated before 1912. Despite their middle-class status, these schoolteachers and the other contributors claimed to speak on behalf of the impoverished Muslim masses (“les humbles”). The editors wrote they wanted La Voix des Humbles, which was published in French, to speak to the state and European settlers as well as Muslim readers. Every cover page of La Voix des Humbles included the journal’s subtitle, “For the evolution of the indigenous by French culture.” This subtitle reflected their role as primary schoolteachers who were trained to facilitate the transmission of French culture.¹⁶ Farther down the cover page featured an illustration of a man in an ʿamama (turban) building a building, brick by brick, with the caption: “Let’s build a new society.” These two slogans together illustrate how the schoolteachers envisioned themselves as vanguards encouraging a new hybrid society in which Muslims would assimilate to French culture and in turn enjoy more rights and a more prosperous society. Interestingly, the man remains dressed in the ʿamama, perhaps suggesting they envisioned the older elite of the vieux turbans were the ones to build a new society, or maybe the turban reflected a respect for Islamic culture.

La Voix des Humbles was not a newspaper but a significantly longer review, with the average issue about thirty-five pages. It frequently published longer pieces, including the minutes from association meetings or political assemblies, as well as serialized fiction pieces. The publication also acted as a mouthpiece for their community of middle-class Muslims, often congratulating recently married couples or posting about the death of a community member. One of the most central groups of actors in the discussions about women were the French-educated Muslim schoolteachers who were part of a small but growing Muslim middle class. Some of the details that appear in the historical record about their editors and milieu illustrate how this community was set apart from the vast majority of Muslim society in a number of ways yet was also connected to other communities. Fanny Colonna has described the schoolteachers as part of “a few thousand members of a ‘cultivated elite,’ the start of a true national elite and a well-formed middle class, fairly militant, with a progressive bilingual press representing several tendencies; open to the rest of the world, but careful not to risk an open break with the metropolis (mainland France) and the colonial authority.”¹⁷

Some of those who were able to become schoolteachers enjoyed some social mobility. La Voix des Humbles cofounder Saïd Faci, for example, was born into a family of poor rural peasants and only began his schooling at age fifteen.¹⁸ The editors and contributors to La Voix des Humbles were also exceptional because they were among the 2.1 percent of Muslim men literate in French.¹⁹ Although they published in French, they also envisioned themselves as educators of the broader Muslim community. They wrote about Islam’s feminist possibilities in order to educate the broader public that women’s education was not a foreign imposition but an essential part of the Islamic tradition.

The papers’ founders maintained multiple connections to other publications, political parties, and associations. Faci, Rabah Zenati, and Mohand Lechani, three of the four La Voix des Humbles cofounders, all published their own books, including novels, alongside their articles.²⁰ From 1945 to 1946 Lechani was elected conseiller général, or departmental administrator, of the Kabyle town Fort National (Larbaâ Nath Irathen). He was against nationalism until he reluctantly signed the “Motion of 61” in 1955 and allied with the Front de libération nationale (National Liberation Front, FLN). Faci, Zenati, Lechani, and the fourth La Voix des Humbles cofounder, Larbi Tahrat, were also all members of the Socialist Party, the Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière (French Section of the Workers’ International, SFIO).²¹ Even these political choices to some extent reflect the exceptional middle-class status of the cofounders, as the SFIO attracted predominantly middle-class Muslim members, unlike the Parti communiste algérien (Algerian Communist Party, PCA), which drew in more working-class Muslims.²² They formed connections, through both the party and the École Normale de Bouzareah, to other interwar notables, including the lawyer of nationalist leader Messali Hadj Ahmed Boumendjel and the militant socialist from Oran, Joseph Begarra.²³ The party was equally a platform within which European women in Oran took up the “colonial maternalist” cause of Muslim women’s advancement.²⁴ Many schoolteachers were active members of a range of associations, including the Association of Indigenous Intellectuals, the Association of the League of French Citizens of Muslim Origin, and the Committee for the Defense of Indigenous Liberties.²⁵

Not all the contributors to La Voix des Humbles and La Voix Indigène were themselves schoolteachers. Some contributors also had roles within the French colonial bureaucracy.²⁶ Brothers and judiciary interpreters Ali, Amar, and Ahmed Hacène published in La Voix des Humbles and La Voix Indigène. La Voix des Humbles was also the first Muslim publication in Algeria to have regular female contributors, who were photographed and featured on the cover of the March/April 1932 issue (figure 1.1). The clothing donned by La Voix des Humbles’ female contributors suggests they were middle- or upper-class and fluent in European sartorial norms.

Many nationalist and Muslim reformist commentators critiqued the schoolteachers’ claim to speak on behalf of the impoverished Muslim masses (“les humbles”) and questioned whether naturalized French citizens like cofounders Faci and Zenati and contributor Abderrahim Bendiab were connected enough to Muslim society. Nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas and La Défense editor Lamine Lamoudi, for example, critiqued Zenati and La Voix Indigène for their support for assimilation.²⁷ Zenati and Faci both became naturalized French citizens in 1903 and 1906, respectively. Very few Muslims held French citizenship, in part because applying for it meant renouncing one’s Muslim personal legal status—a gesture many interpreted as a betrayal to Islam—and in part because of the exclusionary practices of French colonial administrators, who frequently denied applicants for arbitrary reasons.²⁸ The numbers of Muslims naturalized were generally very low with respect to the total population. Between 1905 and 1914, for example, on average forty-three Muslims were naturalized each year.²⁹

The question of naturalization was thorny. Throughout the colonial project in Algeria, colonial theorists debated the best approach for the French colonial state to take with its Muslim colonial subjects.³⁰ Put briefly, “assimilation” in its political sense was the nineteenth-century idea that Muslims could become modern subjects and gain more rights if they could be imbued, through education and other measures, with the universally good values that the French cherished, like civilization.³¹ Yet by the turn of the twentieth century, many had become disillusioned with this political project and argued instead for “association,” which suggested Europeans and their colonial subjects should evolve independently according to their own cultural norms and constraints. The term “assimilation” can thus refer to either this political project or cultural assimilation, in which Muslims adopted European styles of dress or believed in the transformative impact of a French education.

In 1865 a sénatus-consulte, or French law, defined the parameters of personal status and naturalization. It was introduced to the Senate with the claim that it helped undertake the “patient and consistent work of assimilation, of progressive initiation into the benefits of civilization.”³² Yet the law separated French and Muslim subjects, arguing that Muslim norms, customs, and religion rendered them ineligible for French citizenship, so they should thus be governed by Muslim law, while French subjects would be citizens governed by French law. Claims about Muslim sexuality, polygamy, and family customs were central to how lawmakers justified this exclusion of Muslim subjects from French citizenship.³³ In terms of both colonial law and ideology, it cemented difference. As McDougall has written, the 1865 law “combined the preserving principles of ‘association’ with the universalist aspiration of ‘assimilation’ in a powerfully reassuring idea of colonization as progress, while in fact it made ‘progress,’ towards the resolution of the colonial situation in the ultimate emancipation it affected to imagine, impossible.”³⁴

In the first decades of the twentieth century, some Muslim intellectuals, including La Voix des Humbles cofounders Faci and Zenati, abandoned their Muslim personal status to become naturalized French citizens—a move most Muslims interpreted as apostasy.³⁵ Yet in the aftermath of World War I, as anti-colonial sentiment began to percolate globally, even assimilated intellectuals were treated with suspicion by the French colonial regime.³⁶La Voix des Humbles also was subject to censorship and surveillance like other Muslim newspapers, especially for their occasional criticism of the French colonial regime.

The schoolteachers occupied a complicated position with respect to the colonial regime. They were educated in Algeria’s three écoles normales (Bouzareah outside Algiers, Oran, and Constantine), which certified instructors to teach in French colonial primary schools.³⁷ These schools trained schoolteachers in their most primary task, deemed more important than any particular curriculum: the transmission of French culture.³⁸ French colonial administrators even sought to export the successful practices of the école normale of Bouzareah to other colonies. The governor-general of French West Africa (AOF) praised the school for how it did not “strain the religious and social convictions of its audience” but also managed to transmit “the prestige of France and French ideas.”³⁹ They were trained alongside settler colleagues in the écoles normales in how to effectively transmit French culture to their students. As Jonathan Gosnell has described it, Muslim schoolteachers were “anointed as substitute fathers by the French colonial administration.”⁴⁰

Yet as Muslims they were still subject to the arbitrary whims of the Indigénat, a set of laws that cemented Muslims’ secondary status and made them subject to arbitrary punishments. While French administrators praised them for their loyalty to the French cause,⁴¹ the schoolteachers themselves described how, like other Muslims, they continued to be subject to the Indigénat, state surveillance, and “arabophobia.”⁴² As David Prochaska has written, in a settler-colonial society “the maximum points of friction occur … [between] those at the top of indigenous society and at the bottom of settler society.”⁴³ Therefore schoolteachers, as part of Algeria’s growing middle class, likely encountered particular forms of prejudice from settler society. Their publications, like other Muslim periodicals, were subject to censorship. In 1923 Faci was forced to cede direction of La Voix des Humbles to Zenati in order to maintain amicable relations with the French colonial regime after they had censured one of his articles in which he blamed the state’s negligence for the outbreak of tuberculosis. By 1927 Faci had moved to Toulouse, although he continued to publish in Algeria.

While many of the schoolteachers advocated assimilation and disavowed nationalism in later years, the community of schoolteachers as a whole should not be hastily written off as agents of empire. Later generations, including Fadéla Mesli, a nationalist fighter in the Algerian War of Independence, described how some schoolteachers took advantage of their position and the space of the classroom to teach potentially subversive material that would inspire pride in students’ Muslim identity. Of her grandfathers, Mesli wrote:

My grandfathers—maternal and paternal—were part of the first intake of teacher training students. France tried to draw from well-known middle-class families, whose children were talented, to get them to go to the Ecole Normale d’Instituteurs d’Alger. The objective was to train them in French language and culture so that after they could instrumentalize them to win over the rest of the population. [My grandfathers] did not fall into the trap and they kind of rebelled, they did the opposite of what they were meant to do. They taught their Muslim pupils the true values of our country, our culture and our identity.⁴⁴

This suggests that some schoolteachers made use of their liminal position between the French colonial state and Muslims to teach beyond the curriculum.

Another newly formed community with its own publication was the Fédération des élus indigènes algériens (Federation of Indigenous Elected Officials), founded in 1927.⁴⁵ The Fédération des élus eventually had over a thousand members, all of whom held roles within the French colonial administration. Several of their first members were former members of the Young Algerians, a diverse French-educated group united by their calls to end the Indigénat and for equal taxation of settlers and Muslims, and sartorially by their mixing of European-style clothes with the tarbush, or fez. The group had two organs: L’Entente Franco-Musulmane and L’Echo Indigène. Their most outspoken leader was Dr. Mohammed Salah Bendjelloul, who directed L’Entente Franco-Musulmane, first published in 1935.

Some members of these communities would later start other publications. La Voix des Humbles cofounder and schoolteacher Zenati also edited his own newspaper, La Voix Indigène (1929–46), later renamed La Voix Libre (1947–52), until his death in 1952. As a member of the Fédération des élus, Ferhat Abbas critiqued the inequalities perpetuated by the French colonial regime but called for assimilation. By the late 1930s, however, he became increasingly disillusioned with the idea of reforming the existing colonial system and more committed to nationalist politics. He founded his own nationalist political parties, first the Union populaire algérienne (UPA) and later the Union démocratique du manifeste algérien (UDMA).

There were also publications affiliated with religious communities. The Muslim reform movement was ushered into Algeria by Ben Badis and organized through the Association des oulémas musulmans algériens (AOMA). The movement’s mouthpieces in print were three major publications: al-Bassair (1935–39, 1947–56), al-Shihab (1925–39), and La Défense (1934–39). Of their Arabic-language publications, al-Bassair was the more traditional newspaper, often eight pages in length. Their other Arabic-language publication, al-Shihab, published longer essays on social, political, and religious questions alongside Ben Badis’s Qur’anic commentary (tafsir). La Défense was their French-language newspaper run by a younger generation of reformist students.

The reformist movement established itself in opposition to the popular Sufism practiced in Algeria. While popular Sufi practice included pilgrimages to local shrines and allegiance to local Sufi saints and their families, reformists insisted intercession through shrines and saints was entirely unnecessary and Muslims could simply read the Qur’an for themselves. Sufi clergy members also collected payment from the French colonial state, a practice that reformists disavowed. Instead of a fundamental religious or doctrinal incompatibility, however, the tension between Sufis and reformists reflected a struggle over leadership.⁴⁶ The first generation of the AOMA was largely composed of scholars trained in Sufi zawiya (institutions), an illustration of how the communities were initially more connected than diametrically opposed. Still, they differed in their priorities. For the oulémas, it was incredibly important that Muslims in Algeria have their own distinct identity influenced by the Middle East as Arabic speakers, as Muslims, and as Algerians. The AOMA enjoyed wide support, and donors (many of them merchants) helped fund their publications and schools.⁴⁷

Politically, reformists were connected to multiple communities. Ben Badis supported his cousin, Dr. Bendjelloul, and reformists supported Abbas’s UDMA. Lamine Lamoudi, who was the secretary-general of the AOMA from 1931 to 1935 and the editor of La Défense, maintained ties to communist groups in Algeria. In the interwar period the reformists’ vision of a distinct Arabic-language, Muslim, Algerian identity lent itself to a nationalist vision of a future Algerian nation, independent from French colonialism, but the group was largely focused on schooling and its publications. The AOMA became decidedly more political under the leadership of its second president, Sheikh Bashir al-Ibrahimi, when they became more involved with Ferhat Abbas’s nationalist party, the UDMA.⁴⁸ As they became more vocally committed to anti-colonial nationalist politics, their tension with French colonial authorities increased, culminating in the creation of an AOMA office in Cairo in 1949 to operate with less scrutiny.

There were many Sufi orders (tariqa) in Algeria, but the most important were the Rahmaniyya, Qadiriyya, Tijaniyya, and Derqawa orders.⁴⁹ Although Sufi Islam was widely practiced across Algeria, Sufi communities did not have the same widespread, enduring presence in the press as the reformists.⁵⁰ In general, Sufi publications, like the majority of Muslim publications, were small and short-lived because of financial insecurity.⁵¹

In the 1920s a new order emerged in Mostaganem, the Alawiyya, under the leadership of the Sheikh Ahmad Ben Aliwa.⁵² The Alawiyya order’s mouthpiece, al-Balagh al-Jazairi (1926–47, The Algerian Messenger), voiced virulent opposition to the assimilationist tendencies of the schoolteachers, and it critiqued reformists as well. While other publications called for women’s education, al-Balagh al-Jazairi questioned whether Muslim girls’ virtue would be tainted by education or even by regular movement outside the home. They argued that essentialist patriarchy, or men’s natural, innate dominance, was the foundation of Muslim society in Algeria, and any change to it would weaken their society as a whole. While the Mostaganem order lost influence in the 1940s, it still produced a handful of other short-lived publications after the end of al-Balagh al-Jazairi.

While there were many overlaps and connections between these various communities, there were other strict dividing lines. For example, while reformist and Alawiyya communities were staunchly against naturalization, several schoolteachers and contributors to their publications (La Voix des Humbles and La Voix Indigène) were naturalized French citizens.⁵³ Another obvious division was the choice to publish in French or in Arabic.

Some publications defied such neat categorizations entirely. The newspaper al-Najah, which was in print from 1920 to 1956 and was the largest Muslim paper in terms of printed copies, was less ideological than many of its interwar counterparts and would become the largest Muslim publication. Its cofounder and owner, Abdelhafidh ben El-Hachemi, was from an elite family in Biskra connected to the Sidi Ali ben Amar Sufi order.⁵⁴ He was educated at Zeitouna University in Tunis and then moved to Constantine in 1918, where he maintained multiple connections to both Sufi and reformist communities. Like Sheikh Abu Ya‘la al-Zawawi, the imam of the Sidi Ramadan mosque in Algiers who published regularly on women in al-Najah, El-Hachemi maintained ties to both traditional Sufi communities and the emergent Muslim reform movement.

Despite these connections, he never became a nationalist. While La Voix des Humbles and the reformist publications were produced by a team, al-Najah’s editorials were mostly written by either El-Hachemi or the paper’s editor, Smaïl Mami ben Allaoua. Unlike El-Hachemi, Mami was born into an impoverished family in Constantine, but they had similar connections to other important families, like the Ben Badis and Benlabed families. Like El-Hachemi, he too studied at Zeitouna, and despite his humble origins, he was well connected to multiple Muslim milieus across North Africa. Although colonial censors described al-Najah as “favorable to the French cause,” Mami’s regular travel was monitored closely and documented in French colonial surveillance reports.⁵⁵ Even in Tunisia, colonial agents tracked and reported on his connections to Tunisian activists.⁵⁶

Al-Najah capitalized on new wire technology to publish the latest news from the Middle East. In the second half of the 1920s, al-Najah offered a steady stream of coverage of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s rise to power in Turkey and the reforms he undertook in the new Turkish Republic, including new rights for Turkish women. News from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan equally illustrated for readers in Algeria that women’s advancement was an integral part of modernization and uplift. As al-Najah reported this news, commentators in a wide range of publications began framing women’s education in Algeria as an opportunity to participate in the broader renaissance underway in the “the Muslim world.”

This overview is most concerned with the publications that discussed Muslim women, so there are many other Muslim publications, like the nationalist publication Étoile Nord-Africaine, for example, unanalyzed here.⁵⁷ Settler papers were rarely engaged in discussions about Muslim women’s status, except for the occasional publishing of ethnographic accounts of Muslim women. The major exception here were papers by French feminists. The settler feminist paper Femmes de Demain, for example, offered continuous coverage about the status of Muslim women. Some contributors to Femmes de Demain highlighted the contributions of settler women who maintained ties to the Muslim community as educators, nurses, journalists, and amateur ethnographers. The paper claimed that as settler women, their shared bond of femininity made them better able to reach Muslim women than the French colonial regime. Their ability to successfully maintain their intermediary status between the state and Muslim women proved, they argued, that they deserved the right to vote in France. Such claims reappeared in the metropolitan feminist newspaper La Française.

Another settler paper analyzed within this book is Oran républicain, a communist newspaper launched in February 1937, with the agenda of “republicanism and opposition to anti-Semitism and Muslim oppression.” As Allison Drew has mapped, the Parti communiste algérien (PCA) was directed by the Communist International (Comintern) to ally themselves with Muslim anti-colonialism.⁵⁸ As such, one of Oran républicain’s goals was to foster understanding between Europeans and Muslims, including through their weekly “Muslim Page,” which appeared on Fridays, with articles written by socialist Mohamed el Aziz Kessous. Their “Women’s Page,” which appeared on Saturdays, sometimes featured articles about Muslim women’s impoverished lived realities and limited possibilities, written by its editor, Yvonne Mussot.

In both the Muslim press and the French feminist press, articles frequently went unsigned. While reformist papers were developed by a large team, other newspapers had a smaller staff. Unattributed articles in La Voix Indigène were likely written by its prolific editor, Rabah Zenati, while unattributed articles in al-Najah were likely written by either its editor, Smaïl Mami, or its owner, Abdelhafidh ben El-Hachemi. In both the Muslim and French feminist presses, authors also frequently used pseudonyms or initials. Colonial subjects adopted pseudonyms for a wide range of reasons, including to play with notions of authority or to evade colonial censorship or social backlash.⁵⁹ As Stephanie Newell has illustrated, though, the anonymity of sources does not diminish their usefulness in historical analysis.

Readership

The press both reflected and produced community. Publications rendered local events accessible to readers across Algeria. Quotidian events otherwise difficult for historians of colonial subjects in Algeria to access—weddings, association meetings, speeches, conferences, public protests—left their traces within the pages of these publications. They reprinted and commented on speeches, association meetings, and events. Algerian readership practices also produced community around the press. Unlike the European press, subscriptions were infrequent for Muslim newspapers. News was also consumed communally in Algeria, which allowed it to expand its reach beyond the small literate population.⁶⁰ Young men on street corners called out and sang the news to passersby. Both in order to save costs and because of the high rates of illiteracy, a single newspaper was frequently purchased, read aloud, and sometimes translated in its entirety in a café, and then passed along to others. For Muslims, then, to quote Arthur Asseraf, the newspaper was “usually seen or heard rather than read.”⁶¹ This practice was common across the Middle East and made news accessible to the illiterate.⁶² In Algeria, it made news particularly accessible because material in French could also be translated, thus further expanding its reach. Thus the interwar Muslim press was diffused across multiple sites of exchanges in which larger communities could participate in the debates about women, whose status was inextricably linked to Muslim society writ large.

Cafés themselves constituted entire social and intellectual worlds, which were inextricably tied to the social world of the press as well. Not only were newspapers regularly read aloud, but prominent figures associated with different newspapers gathered in particular cafés. In his memoir, the reformist writer Malek Bennabi devotes considerable attention to the café Ben Yamina in Constantine. It was located on rue des Rabins Ech-Charif, down the street from Ben Badis’s office and the reformist printing press that published al-Shihab.⁶³ He labeled this street as the “intellectual artery” of Constantine. Bennabi describes all the characters one would encounter at the café Ben Yamina, including Smaïl Mami, the editor-in-chief of al-Najah, among other notable intellectual figures, like Younès Bahri.

Some Muslim women also read newspapers. Elite families had subscriptions to newspapers. Several of the women who wrote in to Muslim newspapers in the interwar years described being compelled to contribute to ongoing discussions after having read specific articles. There were also more informal ways women would have encountered the news. While cafés where newspapers were read aloud tended to be male-dominated spaces, women may have heard the headlines being read aloud by paper sellers while walking in the streets. Colonial surveillance reports also noted that Muslim domestic workers would listen to radio emissions playing as they cleaned European homes.

All Muslim publications were read closely by French colonial censors. They in turn created reports for superiors that would summarize their contents. They were especially concerned with tracking Algerian interest in Middle Eastern developments. The regime feared that news of anti-colonial revolt or pan-Arabism could inspire Algerian resistance, for example. At the same time, they monitored any supposed pro-French sentiment in a section of news surveillance reports titled “Evolution toward the Occident.” As Asseraf has written, for the French colonial regime, “managing news was a form of managing space, and in particular, the distinction between ‘Algeria’ and ‘abroad.’ ”⁶⁴

The Woman Question Abroad

In the Middle East too, the press was an important outlet for discussions of women, and this is an important context for how these questions played out in Algeria. Discussions about women’s place in society were part of the Nahda (“awakening”), a cultural and intellectual renaissance taking place across the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Early women’s journals in Egypt included Hind Nawfal’s al-Fatat (“The Young Woman”), published in Alexandria as early as 1892, and dozens that followed.⁶⁵ For elite women in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, print culture was a mouthpiece for internal campaigns for women’s rights, as well as a means of challenging external assumptions about Arab women. Within these spaces, efforts to push back against colonial intervention, to modernize, and to grant women rights reinforced each other. Some of these publications were quite long-lasting. The Egyptian Feminist Union’s magazine L’Égyptienne, for example, was in print from 1925 to 1940. Others, of course, were more short-lived but still vibrant forums for women’s issues.

Many of these publications were founded by elites, some with connections to the state. Mahmoud Zarrouk, a civil servant in Tunisia’s Ministry of Justice, founded the Tunisian review Leïla in 1936. Zarrouk was from the wealthy coastal neighborhood of Tunis, Sidi Bou Said, and a member of a powerful family with direct ties to the bey of Tunis. These connections offered him and Leïla a certain degree of protection, although ultimately the publication was subject to censorship by the French in its later issues. L’Égyptienne (The Egyptian woman, 1925–40) was founded by Huda Sharawi, who was since 1923 the founder and head of the Egyptian Feminist Union. Sharawi’s father was the president of the Egyptian Representative Council, the Egyptian parliament between 1881 and 1883, when the British disbanded it. Born into a wealthy family, Sharawi received the benefits of a privileged upbringing, including a multilingual private education. In 1910 she opened her own school for girls that taught academic subjects, as opposed to professional training, and in 1919 she organized the largest women’s protest in support of the Nationalist Revolution. After her husband’s death in 1922, she removed her face veil and eventually unveiled entirely. In addition to L’Égyptienne, she also founded its Arabic-language companion publication, al-Masreyyah (1937–40). Huda Sharawi’s writings and other articles from L’Égyptienne were occasionally reprinted in Algeria.⁶⁶

One theme that reappeared throughout the Middle Eastern women’s press was Arab women’s desire to challenge Orientalist assumptions about them. In L’Égyptienne’s first issue, the Egyptian Feminist Union’s explanation of their decision to publish in French speaks to this agenda. They wrote that they intended to “introduce foreigners to the Egyptian Woman as she is nowadays—removing all the mystery and charm that her past reclusion carried to Occidental eyes—and to enlighten the European public opinion on the actual political and social state of Egypt.”⁶⁷ Similarly, the editorial staff of the Palestinian journal Filastin wrote:

It is gratifying to be able to inform the West and Westerners that an end is being put to their misconceptions of the Arab woman and her alleged slavish status. The Arab woman is not, as most Westerners think, a veiled creature hidden behind screens in voluptuous Hareems of wealthy Pashas and Beys. She is an enlightened and free citizen enjoying equal rights and privileges as her mate and participating in his political activities.⁶⁸

Both publications were motivated by a desire to write back against the stereotypes about them, including veiling, sequestrations, and harems.

Palestinian women described how they were confronted by these stereotypes even more because of the contact colonialism enabled between Palestinian elites and English people. A Palestinian women Matiel Mogannam wrote in 1936, “All English women think Arab women are uncultured. They believe they speak only Arabic, that they all wear veils and rush away at the sight of a man. How I wish I could take English women around to see my cultured Arab friends. How surprised they would be—European clothes, silk stockings, high-heeled shoes, permanently waved hair, manicured hands.”⁶⁹ Elite Palestinian women’s consumption of global fashion culture was a marker, according to Mogannam, of their emancipated status. These excerpts speak to Egyptian and Palestinian women’s consciousness of how they were perceived as backward and oppressed by Europeans by virtue of their Arabness.

In Algeria, though, discussions focused on Algerians’ Muslimness. Discussions in the Muslim press in Algeria about Islam’s emancipatory potential for women were also directed at different audiences. Some French-language papers like those produced by the schoolteachers and the Fédération des élus (La Voix des Humbles, La Voix Indigène, and L’Entente Franco-Musulmane) sought to speak to Algeria’s European settler population. They, more than other papers, were invested in educating the French about Islam. They used a variety of examples from Islamic history and the hadith literature to prove that Islam was not as misogynistic as French stereotypes insisted.

The reformist papers cited similar examples from Islamic knowledge and also argued that Islam was emancipatory for women, but to a different end. They sought not to convince Europeans but instead engage in an internal discussion with other Muslims, including Sufis, about Islamic ideals for women. The reformist position was that Muslim women’s lack of education and strict sequestration was part of popular Sufi Islam’s deviance from the “true Islam” of the time of the Prophet Muhammad and the Qur’an.

In the Muslim press in Algeria broadly, discussions about women were largely dominated by male voices. Yet when women were occasionally published in the Muslim press, they too, like their Middle Eastern counterparts, wrote fiery critiques of ignorant European attitudes toward Muslim women. They also directed their anger at Muslim men for not agitating for more rights for women and at the French colonial state for not providing more material resources to Muslim women.

Algeria’s settler-colonial status set it apart from these other Middle Eastern contexts and gave Islam particular weight and meaning within discussions about women. As Muriam Haleh Davis has written, colonial Algeria enacted a “racial regime of religion” onto its colonial subjects.⁷⁰ In other words, racism against Muslims focused not on their Arabness or Algerianness but on their status as Muslims. Still, the stereotypes against Muslims, and the ways they were codified into colonial Algeria’s legal and political apparatus, demonstrate that religion functioned as race would in other colonial contexts. French claims of Muslim misogyny were an important rationale that the French colonial regime used to legitimize their confiscation of Muslim land in Algeria toward their political and economic ends. So when Muslim commentators in the press insisted on Islam’s feminist potential, they were challenging the very basis of the French colonial occupation.

Algerian Answers to the Woman Question

The debates about women in Algeria had different local stakes for each community. The schoolteachers sought to convince both Muslim society and the French colonial state that more schools for girls were necessary. For the Fédération des élus, Muslim women needed to be educated so that Muslim society could better assimilate to French norms. The Muslim reform movement saw women’s education as necessary for a new generation of mothers to be able to instill in their children pride in their Muslim, Algerian identity. For the Alawiyya order, any new freedoms afforded to Muslim women were dangerous signs of Muslim identity being lost. Like other publications, al-Najah featured a wide range of perspectives on women’s advancement but often described it as one avenue for Muslims in Algeria to enjoy the societal advancement of other modernizing Middle Eastern nations.

There was also a geographic story at play. While the schoolteachers who comprised the AIOIA were trained at the école normale in Bouzareah, a suburb of Algiers, the association itself operated out of Oran in the west of the country. While there were dozens of professional associations for European doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, the Association of Indigenous School Teachers was the first Muslim professional organization established in the image of its European counterparts.⁷¹ Oran was Algeria’s most working-class city, as well as the city with the largest European population, many of whom were Spanish workers.⁷² Some of the schoolteachers, including the leadership of La Voix des Humbles, were also members of the socialist SFIO, active in Oran. Educated to be fluent in French cultural norms, the schoolteachers fit seamlessly into the predominantly European Oranais urban fabric. Constantine, on the other hand, in the east of the country, was a predominantly Muslim city, with a deeply rooted religious establishment. Constantine was home to a long-standing Sufi elite, including members of the family of El-Hachemi, and was where Ben Badis established his own mosque and school, out of which the Muslim reform movement grew. Constantine was also home to a sizable Jewish population. Jews in both Constantine and Algeria broadly maintained a “situational” relationship to their Muslim and settler counterparts, to borrow Ethan Katz’s phrase about how different political and social circumstances resulted in different communal relations.⁷³ From the beginning of the French colonial presence in Algeria, Jews faced an antisemitism from Europeans so virulent that candidates who boasted being “antijuif” were particularly successful in local elections in the late 1890s.⁷⁴ Constantine was also the site of the 1934 riots in which right-wing extremists enflamed tensions between Jews and Muslims, resulting in twenty-eight deaths.⁷⁵ The Muslim publications that operated in these cities reflected each city’s own ecosystem of public life, complete with their layered political and religious allegiances.

Sufism also played out in Algeria according to its own geography. Sufi power was more concentrated in Algeria’s rural areas, which were peppered with important sites of Sufi power, zawiyas and shrines. Zawiyas were institutions that played a religious, educational, and charitable role. They offered a basic religious education as well as Maliki fiqh (jurisprudence) for future scholars. Zawiyas were usually led by a local saint or a muqaddam (leader) connected to the saint. Tombs and shrines devoted to saints and their families were also important centers where people made pilgrimage to pray for intercession. In the interwar years, as more Muslims migrated away from rural Algeria, first to France and then to Algerian cities, such centers lost many of their adherents and donors.⁷⁶ Yet the dominance of Sufi Islam in rural areas should not suggest that the reformist movement operated only in Algeria’s urban centers. Courreye’s work mapping reformist schools, for example, demonstrates their community’s wide reach into rural areas as well.

Interestingly, while historians have stressed this shift in religious practice away from Sufi traditions with the arrival of the Muslim reform movement, these shifts were more subtle in people’s lived realities. When asked about her family’s religious practice, Dahbia Lounas, a woman was born in 1933, explained that “no one in my family or my region knew any Sufi practices.”⁷⁷ She lived in the town of Mirabeau (today Draâ Ben Khedda) near Tizi Ouzou. For Lounas, the religious practices of her region were not “Sufi” but just broadly Islamic. This reflects how Charlotte Courreye has argued that there was much overlap between Sufi and reformist communities and scholars should be careful not to overstate their contrast.⁷⁸

Muslim commentators made sense of their anxieties about women in Algeria by simultaneously looking outward to the Middle East and inward to their own society and their knowledge about Islam. The new technology of wire news granted Muslims in Algeria unprecedented, near immediate access to news from the rest of the world. The Muslim press in Algeria covered and commented on women’s advancement projects happening across the Middle East, sometimes directly via women’s publications, which suggests they had access to some. La Voix des Humbles, for example, reprinted articles from the Egyptian feminist publication L’Égyptienne. Muslim reformist publications reprinted articles from more religious Egyptian newspapers.

Interestingly, religious and secular Algerian Muslims alike saw themselves as part of this larger regional moment of rupture. They took pride in the successes of leaders like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and interpreted his successes as shared victories for the Muslim world. As commentators in Algeria wrote about these projects, they were participating in a larger, transnational conversation about modernity. Indeed, as Marya Hannun has written about Afghanistan, “the very act of discussing women was cast as a central feature of modernity.”⁷⁹ In Algeria too, these discussions about news from the Middle East, modernity, and women were a forum for commentators from multiple different social, political, and religious backgrounds to envision a feminist future Algeria that looked to the Middle East instead of Europe as a model.

The press offered commentators the space to offer their own interpretations of Islamic sources and map out their evidence for readers. Commentators in Algeria looked to the corpus of Islamic knowledge to make sense of their changing society and their changing ideas about women. The growing Muslim reform movement empowered average Muslims to read and interpret Islamic knowledge—a privilege previously limited to a select few—thereby chipping away at boundaries between Muslims and their religious leadership. Scholars had long arranged pieces of Islamic knowledge in the writing of fatwas, but in this period lay commentators took up the practice to construct arguments about women’s lives and possibilities. They cited fragments from the same corpus of Islamic knowledge—the Qur’an, the hadith literature, and Islamic history—but the meaning of these fragments was never fixed. They interpreted the same verses in different ways and thus came to conflicting conclusions about contemporary women. Those engaged in this kind of work were not limited to reformist papers either. Even in more anticlerical papers, commentators would cite and rearrange Islamic knowledge in these ways. Commentators envisioned potentially feminist futures that did not shy away from Islam but reclaimed it as an emancipatory force for women that had been muddled by centuries of patriarchal tribalism and culture. Many publications, for example, either referenced or featured entire articles around the important women of early Islamic history, including Khadija, the businesswoman who married the Prophet Muhammad and became his first follower. While interwar commentators frequently referenced women from Islamic history, they notably did not mention Kahena, the seventh-century Amazigh warrior queen. This illustrates McDougall’s argument about how interwar Muslim reformists sought to cement Algeria’s Muslim identity over other forms of identity, including Amazigh, through their telling of history.

Writing about women offered interwar commentators in Algeria a forum to work through anxieties about the present and competing visions of the future. The numbers and diversity of individuals, including readers, who wrote about women in the press suggests the status of women was of critical importance to a broad segment of the population. In the present they observed a number of changes to Algerian society, many of them wrought by urbanization. These changes included changes in gender norms. Working women’s new visibility, schoolgirls’ limited access to education, and changing veil styles were all markers of present social upheaval, according to commentators. Muslims in Algeria described the Muslim world as in the midst of a transformation toward modernity—within which women’s advancement was key. As commentators reflected on the present-day situation in Algeria, the changes in the Middle East, and Islam’s emancipatory potential, they articulated visions of how women’s advancement could create broader societal uplift in the future. While these commentators disagreed about the particulars of women’s advancement and the ideal future Algeria, the path forward was articulated through aspirations of a future Algeria with women at the center of the process. Women performed—both rhetorically and through their lived realities—the symbolic labor of both Muslim society’s decline and its aspiration.

Looking outward across the region and inward toward women in their society was a critical move through which Muslims imagined a better future. For schoolteachers educated within the French colonial system, women’s limited possibilities signaled the failure of the French colonial state to live up to its values. Some among the growing class of Muslim bureaucrats and representatives saw Muslim women as the conduit through which they could slowly modernize the Algerian public through a French colonial model. They, like the schoolteachers, envisioned a future Algeria that while still under French colonial rule, was prosperous because of how women’s advancement would uplift and modernize the entire society. For Muslim socialists, women’s status represented the worst aspects of an entire political system designed to marginalize Muslims. For Muslim reformists, women’s status reflected how Muslims had deviated from Islam’s original reverence for women. They envisioned a future independent Algeria in which women played a critical role as guardians of Muslim Algerian identity in the next generation. For their Sufi adversaries, new forms of women’s labor were alarming signs of a society losing its hold on what rendered it powerful: essentialist patriarchy. For them, a potentially feminist future represented the ongoing demise of Muslim society under colonialism. For all communities, change in women’s status within Algerian society was a way forward out of the current crises and toward their vision of an ideal Algerian future.

Different religious communities envisioned different roles for women. In Sufi Islam as it was practiced in much of Algeria, women regularly visited saint shrines and cemeteries.⁸⁰ They prayed for themselves and their families, and on behalf of others for Sufi saints to intercede on their behalf with God. There were also cultural and religious rituals that accompanied marriages, childbirths, and deaths, carried out by women, among women. The scholarship on women’s roles in colonial Algeria’s Sufi communities remains underdeveloped. Still, some case studies of specific cases help illustrate what possibilities were available for women within Sufi communities. Julia Clancy-Smith, for example, has examined examples of female saints and leaders in nineteenth century colonial Algeria. She noted that women were of course adherents but also official members in the case of the Tijaniyya and Rahmaniyya orders. In areas where there were a large number of women members, like the commune of Akbou in Kabylie, there were women muqaddamat (circle leaders).⁸¹ Women could also achieve sainthood, the most powerful position within the Sufi hierarchy, as did nineteenth-century saints Lalla Khadija and Lalla Zainab. Augustin Jomier has written about the educated Mzabi women who held multiple important roles within society, including preaching to other women, presiding over important events in women’s lives, and washing women’s dead bodies.⁸² Jomier described a female literary culture among Mzabi women broadly in which many knew how to read Arabic. He analyzes how this particular form of female power declined alongside the rise of Muslim reform in the region.

Indeed, Muslim reformists had their own idea for Muslim women—sometimes articulated in direct opposition to the chaotic, unpredictability of typical Sufi practices. Muslim reformists in colonial Algeria, as in the rest of the Middle East, often wrote about women in terms of their responsibility to the nation as mothers. As he ushered Muslim reformism into Algeria, Ben Badis envisioned women’s education as critical because of women’s status as the custodians of the next generation. Reformist publications echoed this language. And yet, as he educated women and reformists opened schools for girls, they opened the doors to new forms of female power—both discursive and real. Later generations of women educated in reformist schools would themselves become teachers, and they would occasionally even clash with reformist leadership. Within the press too, some reformist commentators offered visions of women playing much greater public roles in society alongside men.

The Woman Question in Muslim Public Life

Print culture was one part of a larger ecosystem of an expanding Muslim public life in the interwar years. The woman question, a shorthand for concerns about women’s status and rights, swept multiple interwar forums. Theater performances asked whether uneducated women could be equal partners to sophisticated male counterparts. Associations and charities banded together to address the scarcity of resources available to mothers. Conferences put on by Muslims and Europeans alike asked how best to help Muslim women.

Debates about women in the press reappeared on stage. Many plays circled around the questions of their lived realities—how Muslim women were forced to support their families in difficult economic times, their limited education opportunities, how they could find love in spite of generational differences in attitudes, how they could find good partners in the climate of alcoholism. Several of the plays of the era’s most famous Muslim playwright, Mahieddine Bachtarzi, centered around issues surrounding working-class women’s lives. His play The Love of Women, for example, reflected ongoing discussions in the press about women’s lives.⁸³

Bachtarzi attracted a wide audience. A surveillance report noted that in six months alone (September 1936 to February 1937), the Bachtarzi troupe performed nineteen shows of five different plays in twelve different cities, with one showing having up to two thousand Muslims in the audience. Women were among the crowds of spectators, sometimes in the thousands, who gathered to watch plays (figure 1.2). Within the theater audiences were also figures like Ben Badis and others from the AOMA, politicians, and schoolteachers, as well as editors and contributors to Muslim newspapers, such as Smaïl Mami, the editor of al-Najah.⁸⁴

There were also dozens of smaller theater groups whose plays similarly reflected this interest in women.⁸⁵ In December 1936, for example, a local theater troupe performed a piece titled Ya Baba Zouedjni (Marry me, father) to an audience of 250 in Skikda (then Philippeville), about a Muslim son who wanted his father’s blessing to marry a young European woman, the daughter of a police officer. The play is largely a series of conversations between the young man and his parents. The turning point occurs in the third and final act, when the son reads about the modern, Muslim women of Egypt who were functionaries and doctors, drove cars, and flew planes. This new knowledge inspires the son to offer a speech about how Muslims need to elevate themselves through the education and emancipation of women. Just as in discourses in the press, the example of what Muslim women could achieve elsewhere served as a reminder of what was possible in Algeria. The valorization of the achievements of Egyptian women signaled the potential greatness of the working women of Algeria as well.

Women were also participants in interwar theater culture. While the stage was typically dominated by men, the Jewish actress Marie Soussan began acting on stage in 1925 at the Casino d’Alger.⁸⁶ Throughout the 1930s she appeared on stage in a variety of performances, many with the theater troupe of actor Rachid Ksentini, to whom she was also married. Women also attended theater performances. In 1933 L’Afrique du Nord illustrée published a photograph of a recent performance of Soussan and Ksentini in Blida, which shows several women dressed in haiks in the audience.⁸⁷ The quality of the photograph makes unveiled women more difficult to spot, though they may have been in attendance too.

Like theater, music was another domain of Muslim-Jewish collaboration in the interwar years. There too, concerns about women were the subject of many famous songs recorded, disseminated, and rerecorded by Jewish North African artists, sung in Arabic. Chris Silver has recently mapped the impact of four major Tunisian women singers of the era: Habiba Messika, Ratiba Chamia, Louisa Tounsia, and Dalila Taliana. They sang about love, sexuality, the challenges women faced, and their status as modern women, and like Bachtarzi, they were prolific. Silver noted that “between 1924 and 1930, Messika recorded close to one hundred records.” Although they were Tunisian, their music was listened to across the region. In Algiers, Messika’s performances had thousands in the audience.⁸⁸ Like theater, listening to music, through both live performances and records, was a popular art form enjoyed by men and women of all social classes in Algeria, which reflected the larger social questions swirling about women and their place in North African society.

Associations were another domain where the intellectual life of the Muslim press played out in public. The Muslim reformists had several important associations, including the Cercle du Progrès, which hosted conferences and speeches, and the Kheira mutual aid society. In 1940, when Kheira moved to a new location, they held a large celebration that featured speeches, a comedy theater performance from the Bachtarzi troupe, a sports drill, and a skit performed by young girls from the Shabiba school.⁸⁹ The range of these forms of entertainment speaks to the breadth of the networks through which Muslim reformist influence played out. When new Muslim reformist schools were inaugurated, they similarly held large public celebrations to foster community support.

Politics was another area in which Muslim women also participated alongside men in political rallies and protests. They crowded into stadiums alongside men to hear Messali Hadj, the leader of the nationalist and communist Étoile nord-africaine party, speak.⁹⁰ They also protested in the streets alongside men. In June 1936 women joined male workers to march in support of Messali Hadj’s Étoile nord-africaine political party. Photographs of women protestors were published in multiple European publications, including Liberté and L’Afrique française.⁹¹ In April 1939 around forty women were among the crowd of three thousand who marched in support of the Messali Hadj in Algiers.⁹² During the national hymn, these women made their presence known by offering their youyous, an ululation offered by women across North Africa as a means of expressing support and cheer, often at weddings and celebrations.

There was thus an entire ecosystem of intellectual energy devoted to Muslim women, the epicenter of which was the press, but which also included theaters, sports, associations, schools, and religious institutions.